Tandem Jump
by countessofbiscuit
Summary: The Incom T-65 X-Wing Starfighter is a single-pilot craft … unless you're the best and most headstrong pilots in the Resistance and it's the only ride off this rock you've got. (A/N: a Poe x Rey ChocoBox 2018 fic for igrockspock)


So Crait had been a bust.

A cockup largely of his making, which the General—he'd been reminded that first-name basis was a _privilege_ , and certainly not a right for a demoted officer—probably wouldn't let him forget this side of hell. Holdo's final, radiant salvo trumped every collective explosion he'd ever delivered upon the First Order, and until he could demonstrate that blowing things up wasn't the only skill he brought to the Resistance, he'd be riding this and every future hyperspace jump blind.

 _The Outer Rim_. An unimaginably vast expanse of space, but a shamefully curt answer to his enquiries about their final destination.

("But we're already in the Outer Rim!"

"Then we're going to the Ass-End of Nowhere, Flyboy, twenty parsecs past the nearest black hole and straight on till morning. Got it?")

The pit stops helped. There'd been no way of telling if the First Order had managed to lock onto the Falcon with their newfangled tracking tech, so the General had Rey and Chewie doing this the old-fashioned way. Random, illogical jumps from system to system, planet to planet, taking no chances but burning shitloads of fuel.

But some pit stops were more calculated than others.

This particular glorified asteroid had a fuelling station run by a blind Devaronian and a small outfit of reprogrammed battle droids. It also, if their luck and the General's memory held, might contain some Rebellion-era starfighters that had been stowed for safekeeping on the dark side of the rock and promptly forgotten about. Collecting antiquated craft was what any self-respecting insurgency in this galaxy did after all. It wouldn't replace _Black One_ , but he'd take a vintage X-wing over a salt-corroded skimmer any day.

While the Falcon refuelled and the General gossiped with the station's proprietor, the six respirators this remnant of the Resistance had between them were divvied up among three search parties. Connix and Chewie crested a ridge directly behind the station, while Finn and C'ai banked off to the right. Rey had argued she could very well explore alone, thank you, but BB-8 and Finn were having none of it, and well, Poe was far from opposed to getting to know the pretty Jedi a bit better.

After the General's phenomenal cold-shirt save and Luke Skywalker's— _the_ Luke Skywalker! —projection stunt, her feat with the boulders had convinced him he was living in a new age of heroes, like the ones that had populated his mom's bedtime stories. The ones the galaxy had almost, _almost_ persuaded him had disappeared with the Force itself.

Naturally, he had some questions.

But he hardly had his respirator over his mouth and properly calibrated before she was down the loading ramp and scrambling off towards a treacherous bit of ground to the left, BB-8 beeping anxiously up at him to get a move on.

"So," he began, catching his breath as he pulled up beside her. "The rock trick. Does that work on people too?"

"I don't know. I haven't tried yet."

"But do you think it could?"

"With practice, maybe. So far I've mostly … broken things."

"I'd volunteer."

The sideways look she threw him, all arched brow and cool eyes, was unimpressed. "Yes, I've been told you don't do _grounded_ very well."

 _Well done, Dameron, you just got farkled_.

They picked their way over the pocked and scraggy terrain for the better part of ten minutes more before he grew tired of what might have passed for companionable silence, if he hadn't gotten the distinct feeling that his companion was actively trying to ditch him. Her agility far outstripped his, and she always seemed to be three serrated boulders in front of him, while he was struggling to put one boot in front of the other without tearing the letheris or catching his toe in a crevice. The refracted light from the nearest gas giant illuminated their path only in a very sharp, very deceptive relief.

"If I didn't know better," he shouted through the respirator, trying to look in command of himself while swaying like a spacesick Gungan, "I'd say you were following a tracking beacon to these cryptic ships."

"I am."

 _Oh._

"What—like...through the Force?"

"Yes."

"So they're definitely here?"

"Yes. Please"—she threw up a hand behind her as if to shush him—"I'm concentrating."

Great. He wasn't just on the backfoot with this woman, he was on his ass ten klicks behind her. He opted to just stow it at that point and focus on hauling himself up the steep escarpment she was already kneeling upon, gazing ahead into the void with her fingertips pressed into the rock on either side of her. But when his foothold gave way and he instinctively threw out an arm to catch onto something, already saying goodbye to the sleeve of this second-best jacket, she caught his flailing hand in hers and dragged him up beside her with a charitable smile.

"Thanks," he huffed.

"Sorry. That was rude. It's just...this was much easier back when it was only 'intuition' and 'luck.' Now that I'm trying to manipulate it to show me what I specifically want to find, there's...a different sort of effort involved."

"Don't worry about it," he said, his feeling of foolishness subsiding— _forgotten_ really, when he noticed she was still holding his hand. So far she'd kind of ignored him and admitted to being a lousy Jedi, but he was impressed as hell.

Especially when she squeezed his hand and pointed off to the left. "There they are!" she said with genuine enthusiasm, her finger indicating where a dark mass was outlined against the barest of reflected light. He could see nothing but an inky black shape in a landscape of inky black shapes.

"I'll take your word for it."

"Come on!" she squealed, still holding his hand. He tripped along after her, trying to match her confident stride as they jogged along the curved ridge.

When they were standing directly above the jutting mass she'd pointed to, she released his hand and promptly dropped to all fours, shimmied backwards to the edge, and free climbed down the bank into the void like she was descending some unseen ladder.

"Uh. Rey? Maybe it's time to pretend I'm one of those rocks?"

"What?" she shouted from somewhere between five and ten meters below him, but it might as well have been the first ring of Corellian hell for all he wanted to climb down _backwards_ to meet her.

"Care to fly me down?"

She didn't respond immediately. Instead, a string of exultations and repetitions of "cool!" echoed out from underneath him, like she'd entered a shallow cave. And then there was the unmistakable sound of padded bone meeting titanium alloy and the _creak!_ of canopy hinges drifting up to where he was standing, alone and increasingly anxious to see these starfighters for himself.

"You're gonna have to fill me in, Rey," he yelled from the edge, where he was on his hands and knees fruitlessly shining his puny flashlight to assess the integrity of this particular precipice… and maybe to catch even a nose of one of the ships. "Whaddya lookin' at?"

"Three _gorgeous_ tee-sixty-fives."

Birdbumps broke out under his shirt. "Space-worthy?"

A few more bangs, clicks, and one very loud thwunk! "Difficult to say. You should comm Leia."

He hesitated for one stupid, selfish moment at the thought of someone else getting the credit for acquiring the first X-wings for the reborn Resistance before fumbling for his commlink.

 _"Organa here."_

"General, we've got starfighters. Your vintage."

An audible sigh … hopefully of relief, not exasperation. Could he still crack jokes like that? _"Send me your location. I'm bringing your droid."_

He pocketed the comm and was reappraising his courage in relation to his mounting curiosity, when Rey suddenly appeared in his lowered beam, shielding her eyes to look up at him.

"I'm not optimistic about getting all three out of here."

"What?"

"Either they were left behind for a reason or we aren't the first people to find them."

He scrubbed his hands over his eyes and through his hair. "Just...give me a sec."

It wasn't that he didn't believe her, but he'd be damned if he abandoned three X-wings without looking upon them with his own eyes and administering certain rites: rubbing their undercarriages, kissing their noses, and checking the cockpits for loose credits.

"May the Force be with me," he sighed under his breath before he hooked the flashlight onto his belt and assumed a very precarious position, his ass up in the air with his pelvis balanced on the edge as he toed around for purchase.

It was slow going until it was very suddenly _not_. His left foot and right hand slipped at just the wrong moment and he was rudely reminded of the old flight school joke about getting reacquainted with gravity.

When the impact didn't come, he was briefly outraged because, _honestly_ , he hadn't thought the drop would _kill him,_ just hurt a helluva lot, and dammit, that platitude about death being swift couldn't _really_ be as true as all that. Squeezing one eye open to find himself weightlessly staring at stars did nothing to convince him wasn't dead—the interstellar quiet was as close to any conception of 'heaven' as he ever wanted to come—but then hard rock came up to kiss his back and it all, well, fell into place.

"I thought you said you'd never done that?" he said from where he lay sprawled on the ground, tilting his head towards a glow of artificial light. She was standing next to one of the ships, one arm inside an open panel, the other still outstretched in his direction, and looking a little stunned, like a pilot who'd just fired a torpedo she hadn't known she'd been packing.

Her momentary daze broke and she ran towards him, glancing him over as if for any unwelcome side effects of her little trick. "I haven't. It was just...instinct?"

He propped himself up on one elbow and smiled broadly at her. "Well, whatever it was, keep doing it." When he offered her his other hand and she helped haul him to his feet, he liked to think he saw all the tell-tale signs of a blush without actually being able to discern the color of her cheeks.

Actually, he couldn't see much of anything. The flashlight she'd been using was just propped up inside the open panel of one of the X-wings and was letting out only a small rectangle of light. He pulled out his own and beamed it wildly around to take in the three fighters, all bearing purple markings and the scars and burns of battle, whistling long and low in appreciation. "Would you look at them."

"This one is in surprisingly good repair," she began, thumping the nose of the middle one, "and its fuel cell is full, like someone in recent memory had almost escaped with it, only to be stalled by a tricky fault in the foils. That's manageable, at least, but the other two are probably beyond saving, even if I cannibalize one to serve the other. I think the repulsorlifts are toast, for one thing, and if we have _any_ spare fusial couplings or magnetic repressors on the Falcon, a cactus will grow out of my boot."

He walked around the starfighters as she spoke, scratching his stubbly jaw in contemplation, popping open panels, taking in bits of loose wiring, and remarking with a sinking feeling all the vital pieces that should've been in vital places but weren't. It felt like sizing up a corpse and he hated it.

"Well," he sighed from where he'd climbed onto the wing of one of the hopeless ships, "one's better than none. I can make a single fighter feel like ten anyway, and I'm sure the General will—"

As if on cue, the dull roar of a freighter bore down on them from overhead and the Falcon eased down in front of the cave, its floodlights temporarily blinding him. He hopped down from the wing and strolled towards the descending cargo ramp.

The General was still wearing that sturdy robe with an imperious collar, and the way she strode down the ramp, pressurized air billowing dramatically around her, she looked every inch the Queen the Empire had never let her become. He suddenly felt that a single X-wing was a lousy tribute to present to such a woman.

"General," he greeted her, about to promise all sorts of great things from this reclaimed fighter anyway, but Rey was suddenly in front of him, taking the General's hand and leading her up to the nose of the one operable craft.

"It's not as good as we hoped ma'am. I'm afraid only this one will fly out of here any time soon. But with BB-8's help, I'll have her space-worthy in a few hours and we'll rendezvous at the next stop."

And there was his buddy, having rolled up out of nowhere, beeping in collusion. What.

"Hey. Hey, wait a sec," he says, marching up to where they're standing, thick as Hutts. "I thought I was the pilot."

Rey shot him that same arch expression from earlier, this time accented with something like disbelief. " _I_ found it and I have the advantage of being both a _pilot_ and—"

"A _Jedi_ , yeah, I know—"

"No," she scoffed, "a _mechanic_. Some of us had to build the ships we flew from scratch, hot shot."

Right. He was on the point of saying something pithy about about 'taking the Jedi out of Jakku'... but one stern look from the General and he bit his tongue. Momentarily, at least.

"What's that got to do with anything? You fix her up, I'll fly her out."

"Because the Falcon _has to keep moving_ —or were you asleep in the briefing?"

He'd actually been counting freckles on her neck from where he'd been seated behind her, but whatever.

"Look, Rey"—and there was no way to say this without sounding like a dick, but she really, _really_ needed to understand—"an X-wing is a touchy beast. 'Hair-trigger' doesn't even begin to describe it. Your Imperial sims won't do much good—"

"Says the pilot who crashed a TIE and almost didn't make it out of the hangar."

"Shot down. I was _shot down!_ "

"Still crashed!"

"Yeah, well, when you've got the combined payload of a Star Destroyer and a fleet of TIE's knocking at your ass—"

 _"Enough!"_ And the General shoved all one-and-a-half meters of herself into their little fracas with the force of a ronto. "I didn't serve as senator in two corrupt galactic governments to mediate this shit. You've got three minutes to work this out between yourselves like adults"—she started in the direction of the Falcon, before turning back to wave her stick at him—"bearing in mind, _Dameron_ , that you're still grounded and only Rey is getting the coordinates for rendezvous."

This … couldn't be happening. He was the best pilot in the Resistance!

Rey just stood there with her arms crossed, staring at him like she was waiting for a petulant child to tire itself out, and yeah, he wanted to throw a fit at being expected to withdraw on account of the General's _blatant_ favoritism … except he'd been on the positive end of that himself. And he was immediately struck by how cute she was, the way her hair had fallen into a loose mess around her shoulders and her forearms were, um, accenting things.

Something like a thought struck him—even if did originate a bit too low in his stomach to be fully rational.

"That cockpit can seat two in a pinch, you know."

She visibly sagged and rolled her eyes, like even this backrocket scavenger knew a shitty pickup line when she heard one. "You can't be serious."

But he was, more than he'd thought when he considered what might be gained for the Resistance by his desperation-cum-flirtation. "It can. And you're a _mechanic_. We don't know, the other two might be fixable after all, if you have the time and two helpful, flight-certified assistants to work on them."

She twisted round look at the fighters over her shoulder, then turned back to slowly cast her eye from his unshaved face to his boots, as if mulling over his proposition—and him.

"And you'd gamble the most uncomfortable hyperspace jump of your life on the off-chance I can go three-for-three on ships that have been sitting here collecting space dust for thirty-odd years?"

"Absolutely … besides, who says it has to be uncomfortable?"

This. This why he didn't play sabacc—he almost always overplayed his hand. She was staring at him, wide-eyed, like he had mynocks crawling out of his ears, and he stupidly, belatedly hoped his hair looked alright. Too late to run his fingers through it.

Just when retreating inside the safety of the Falcon seemed like the right idea after all, a smile grew from underneath her respirator all the way up to the corners of her bright eyes.

"General?" she shouted, still holding him with her gaze, "we're going to fly out of here together. One way or another."

Waiting for the General's response started to feel like waiting for her blessing, and he broke out into a bizarre sweat before her deep, raspy chuckle reached them both. "A Kenobi compromise. Well done."

There was no telling what that meant, but he filed it away to ask about later.

The General synced her chrono with Rey's and forwarded the coordinates, before leaving them with an extra bag of rations, the spare toolkit, a better flashlight, two replacement oxygen canisters, and the parting instruction to "Buckle up, kids."

They had allowed six hours for repairs and they worked well into that, starting with the most spaceworthy fighter. BB-8 lent their welding services while he mostly just handed Rey whatever she pointed to, adjusted the flashlight when she asked, and rifled through the cockpits of all three ships—a distraction which netted him fifteen Imperial credits, a wrinkled holo of two Rodian children that might interest the General, a clone trooper bobblehead, and—alarmingly—six live thermal dets. (He left behind the nuna wing bones, packs of stale chewstim, empty Ardees cans, and illicit newstacks that testified to pilots having evolved little from Rebellion to Resistance.)

The planetoid's rudimentary shield and gravity wells were good for some things, but it didn't do much for the temperature. He'd given Rey his jacket pretty early on and he couldn't help notice how well it suited her too.

So when it became evident that no amount of tinkering and half-assed repairs were going to get anything beyond the original serviceable fighter into the air, he wasn't _wholly_ heartbroken.

They cleaned the astromech socket and secured BB-8, checked and triple-checked the fuel cells and hyperdrive, prepped the life support so they could ditch the damn respirators, and rearranged the bits of survival gear they'd scraped together behind the seat for maximum legroom. Then it was time to board. It was only when he was standing on the wing, one foot propped up on the lip of the cockpit, helping Rey step down into the snug compartment that he realized how similar this situation was to any number of bad holopornos that were mandatory viewing for every fleet noob.

Of course, _bad_ was relative.

Now that he found himself in an equally improbable situation with a girl who was totally out of his range (maybe not in the looks department, he flattered himself, but definitely on account of the Force thing), he became embarrassingly eager for one or five of those scenarios to play out in this cockpit.

It took a bit of awkward maneuvering—

"Should I—"

"Is this right?"

"That's—woah—"

"Sorry, I'll, um, scoot up."

"Can you—?"

"Ouch."

"Move the armrests."

"Thanks."

—but eventually they were in.

He was fit and she was slim, but no question, this was only ever designed to be a single-pilot craft. She sat squeezed in between his thighs, his knees bent and jammed against the walls, and within moments of her shifting about to test her access to the control pedals, once or twice pressing her hand perilously close to his groin as she adjusted position, he was uncomfortably stiff. Four hours of this and he was going to have a helluva time explaining the state of his pants upon arrival.

There was also the problem of what to do with his arms. He couldn't casually rest them on the sides of the cockpit without interfering with her access to the controls, and her warm back was flush against his chest. He could either grasp her shoulders like a wet lettuce or hold onto his knees like he was taking a painful shit. Even considering the third option could have messy and explosive consequences.

Maybe he could start by rearranging her hair so it didn't keep catching on his tongue.

"Ready, Captain?" she asked over her shoulder as she primed the engines. The small movement brought her freckled ear to his lips, but there was nowhere to go. Her hair smelled like chooca nuts and, combined with the tangy scent of his worn-in Runyip leather jacket around her warm neck, it was doing his head in.

"Captain? _You're_ the pilot."

"Of the fighter, yes." And he hadn't thought she could slot her ass any further into his lap, but she did, and it left no room, not a millimeter, to misinterpret what she said next. "But I was hoping you'd still take charge of...in-flight entertainment."

What.

His brain felt like it had been scrambled through a wormhole, but he eventually had just the presence of mind to tell BB-8 to power down, because, Force help him, if he was going to live out his own bad holoporno, he wasn't going to have his buddy watching.

The best pilots in the Resistance could do this manually after all.


End file.
